Tag Archives: create

My ideas about teaching teaching and learning are changing. They are becoming broader and including more room for coding and creating in all sorts of ways.

That doesn’t mean I’m throwing away everything I’ve learned over the past years. But it does mean that I want to look a little more broadly about what education can become with the tools that we have access to.

I gave the keynote session at the BYTE conference last week and I heard myself say something that I’ve said many times at conferences before:

“Computers in classroom are not meant to be just fancy typewriters. Computers need to allow us to do completely new things. Completely different things.”

I’ve said this before. Other people have said this before. But this time it really got me thinking about what “different” means. I’ve been thinking about transforming classrooms. About rereading curriculum documents through a twenty first century lens. I’ve been thinking about science and math, but also about reading and writing and art. How do these things look? How should they look?

For the past few years my classroom has been based around the Idea Hive, a collaborative hybrid online space. That isn’t going away. But I’m thinking about “new” and “different.” I’m thinking about a new focus on innovation, on creativity, on communication. I’m wondering what a classroom might look like that has a real focus on doing things that we couldn’t do without the technology.

That’s led me to design this new logo tonight that will be going up in my classroom as soon as I can get a full size version made:

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the importance of making and creating in education.

To support that, I’ve added a resource page to this blog that will list resources that people can use if they want to start thinking down these lines.

I’ve spent some time collecting different types of resources that might be useful to people. At this point, it’s more of a starter list.

If you’ve got a piece of software, a book, a product, an essay or anything else that might fit fit into the idea of supporting hackserspaces or makerspaces in schools, for kids, in education, send me an email at glassbeedatgmaildotcom or leave a comments here and I’ll add it to the list.

I’ve spoken out a fair amount about tablets in classrooms. While I like them as a device, my concern has been that given the limited and finite resources available to schools, I’ve been wondering if schools are purchasing tablets when they could be buying cameras or microphones or full laptops that allow students more leeway to both consume information and to create.

I’ve been using a tablet on and off for the best part of a year. I’ve spent time with an Asus eee pad and a Blackberry Playbook (strangely I’ve never spent that much time with the all pervasive ipad). As I said, I like using a tablet. Living in a small town, I like the ability to purchase and download books instantly. I like the ability to jump between twitter, my book, a news app and email all with the touch of a finger. But I’ve noticed that I mainly use it for consuming information. I write email, 140 character tweets and notes about the book I’m reading. But I don’t use it for what I would consider to be intensive, high level, deeply creative tasks. Of course, this might be just me. It might be a changing paradigm of computing that I’m getting caught behind.

But still, overall I would consider a tablet to be mainly a consumption device. This was a great criticism I had of them.

But I’m wondering if that is fair.

Technology certainly has democratized the tools of creation. We can now create and publish to the world in any number of ways, using any number of media. This is the theory of technology as the great leveler. We now each have our own global printing press that we carry in our pocket.

But how many of us use it?

How many people actually use the tools we have available to us to write, to take great photos, to create videos or animations?

Certainly there are a lot more than in the past. Millions of blogs and flickr postings. Youtube videos uploaded by the millions of hours.

But many of these blogs and twitter accounts are short lived, only publishing a few items before being abandoned. Let us also be free to admit that a lot of what is published isn’t worth our time to look at.

So is the consume vs create paradigm a false binary? While we certainly want people to be able to create using the tools they are comfortable with and share what they make, is it reasonable to expect that all people will be high level creators? Should we be concentrating on these skills or should we instead be working to help people become informed consumers and curators of information since this is the most coman role they will find themselves in? What is the best use of time in our classrooms? What skills will people be called upon to use most often? A successful program will of course involve helping people to become successful consumers, curators and creators of information, but should “creation” be considered the top of pinnacle?

Just above this post is a grey menu bar. If you come here regularly, you might notice there’s a new addition up there. Mind you, if you always come here via an RSS reader, you probably can’t see anything different and actually need to click the link and go to the actual blog.

I’ve decided to add a resources page to this blog. Over the time that I’ve been blogging, I’ve managed to create a number of different resources as pdf files and more major blog posts. Some of these are for teachers and others are meant to be used with students. Some of these things have been languishing in the back pages of this blog and occasionally people will email me and ask for something they saw on here earlier. I thought it might be easier to short circuit that process and bring a number of these things together in one place.

Take a look and see if there’s anything useful. As always, feel free to use what you need and modify it to meet your needs.

A design for a t-shirt that grew out of a recent Apple Distuinguished Educator’s weekend in Japan, I think it’s missing a word: share.

While it may be argued that the idea of “share” might be built in to “create” or in what it means to “lead,” I think this is a problem with our language.

In English, when we think about the idea of creation, it is usually thought of as a process undertaken by an individual. The idea of creation also doesn’t include the idea of sharing. While creations can be shared, they don’t have to be.

This is why I think we need a few more words in the English language.

I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I know I have heard that in several Inuit languages, there are multiple words for different types and ages of snow. As well, in Greece (a nation that for centuries depended on the sea) I’ve heard there are many different idea of “blue.”

I don’t think the idea of “creation” takes into account all of the possibilities of ways that this process takes place in our society.

- Single individuals can create something.
- Single individuals can create something and then share it with the globe.
- Multiple individuals scattered across the globe can create a shared resource for themselves.
- Multiple people can create something which can then be remixed by another group and then added to an already existing resource.

and so on…

Almost anything we can create, from words to pictures, to animations and on and on can be shared easily, globally and inexpensively.

I believe our idea of create needs to change so that by default it includes the idea of sharing what we make.